Kıvılcım Arat, a Turkish LGBTI activist, is entering the third day of a hunger strike to expose human rights violations committed against Diren Coşkun, a transgender woman who has been held in pre-trial detention in Tekirdağ prison. According to the T24 news portal, Coşkun launched a hunger strike after she was denied surgery by the Tekirdağ prison management on Jan 25. Arat, who is a member of Lambdaistanbul LGBTI Solidarity Association, has joined the hunger strike on Monday.

On October 26, 1996, a small group of activists picketed outside an American Academy of Pediatrics conference in Boston to draw attention to the fact that cosmetic surgeries were routinely being performed on intersex children and newborns. Now, October 26 is Intersex Awareness Day every year

Over the weekend, Indonesian police raided several beauty salons and held transgender women for three days, cut their long hair, forced them to wear men's clothes, and gave "counselling and coaching". "It's going well and now they are all acting like real men," thelocal police chief said. This was in Aceh, a province that is much more conservative than the rest of the country, and not necessarily representative of national sentiment. But it follows a series of raids of gay bars in the capital Jakarta and comes as Indonesian lawmakers consider changes to the criminal code that would effectively make gay sex illegal, as well as any other sex outside of marriage.

SOCIAL attitudes in Northern Ireland towards LGBTI people are much more positive than they were a decade ago, a newly released Equality Commission survey has found. Positive views of LGB people increased from 57 per cent in 2008 to 83 per cent in 2016 when the latest survey was carried out. And for transgender people, positive attitudes also rose from 48 per cent in 2011 to 78 per cent in 2016.

Today, the global research firm IPSOS released the results of a 23 country survey, including the US, on attitudes toward transgender people. The data was collected online between October 24th and November 7th, 2017 and included the following countries: Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Ecuador, France, Great Britain, Germany, Hungary, India, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, Poland, Russia, Serbia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, and the United States of America. For the purposes of this summary write-up, however, Ipsos has chosen to focus on findings from the 16 countries where internet penetration is sufficiently high to feel confident that the data is truly nationally representative

Police in Indonesia’s conservative Aceh province carried out a crackdown on a group of transgender women Sunday, forcibly shaving their heads and making them wear men’s clothing. Police took 12 trans women into custody early Sunday and took them to a hair salon for the shaving and gave them the clothing as a means of “coaching” them to “become men,” North Aceh Police Chief Ahmad Untung Surianata told state media, according toCNN.“In addition, the officers also nurtured them by way of having them run for some time and telling them to chant loudly until their male voices came out,” he said. The chief said the women were then taken to a police station for “further guidance” and that the action was intended to keep transgender people from “adversely affecting” younger Indonesians, CNN reports.

Scotland has gone from criminalising LGBT people, to now recognised as among the best in the world for LGBT equality. This week marks the start ofLGBTHistory Month. The annual celebration across Scotland recognises the contribution lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people have made to our society, and raises awareness of the history of the LGBT rights movement. We’ve come a long way in recent years. After decades of campaigning and hard-won progress, Scotland has gone from being a country that once criminalised LGBT people, to one that is now recognised as among the best in the world for LGBT equality.

THE group Bahamas Trans Intersex United has suggested Attorney General Carl Bethel overstated the work the government has done to accommodate the needs of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex community when he addressed an international body recently. Last week, Mr Bethel told those gathered for the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) Universal Periodic Review (UPR) Working Group that the Bahamas has a history of extending minor legal protections and tolerance for LGBTI members. While in Geneva, Switzerland, he pinpointed the country’s act of decriminalising buggery in 1991. However, according to lead spokesperson of BTIU Alexus D’Marco, this is “laughable”.

Transgender women experience the most discrimination of all LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) people in Myanmar, according to a report released by a non-government group on Tuesday. The two-page report, entitled “Baseline Assessment Report on Promotion of Human Rights and Rule of Law for LGBT Community in Yangon” also noted that while Myanmar society has become more tolerant of LGBT people, discrimination due to sexual orientation remains rampant. Daw Nilar Myaing, research program manager of the project, said that police tend to arrest more transgender women (men who dress and behave like women but have yet to change their sex) in public places compared with other members of the LGBT community.

"Blood was squirting out of my chest," says Brithany Cervantes as she recalls being stabbed multiple times with a broken bottle for no other reason, she says, than being a transgender woman. "All that saved me was putting my hand over my heart. I could have died," adds Cervantes, as she shows the jagged scars above her left breast and on the back of her left hand. Yet the most chilling detail regarding the frenzied nighttime attack in downtown Lima last October has little to do with her unknown assailant. Rather, it concerns the municipal security agent who watched the entire episode from the other side of the street without lifting a finger.